COVID-19 has raised awareness about the precarious health situation of prisoners and others in detention facilities. Recently, Ohio has seen a surge of confirmed COVID-19 cases in prisons and in one prison, the Marion Correctional Institution, nearly eighty percent of inmates have tested positive for the virus. What ethical challenges face researchers trying to study prison populations especially in light of their status as a vulnerable population who have been exploited and involuntarily experimented upon by medical researchers and whose susceptibility to the disease is the result of poor institutional conditions? How can we balance respect for human rights while ensuring that prisoners are not excluded from scientific progress. Join us for an interdisciplinary discussion with experts in Epidemiology, Criminology, and Law.

Panelists include:

Maria Khan (Associate Professor, Department of Population Health, New York University)

CARE Panel Recording: The Ethics and Regulation of Clinical Trials for COVID-19 Treatments

A variety of clinical trials have been initiated at warp speed to establish evidence around treatment of COVID-19, identifying a vaccine candidate, and understanding immunity to the disease. This panel will discuss how research should be conducted ethically and how healthcare professionals, regulators, and the general public should make use of the evidence as it trickles in. Some of the questions we will focus on: Should criteria for trial participation be altered due to the urgency of the pandemic? Should challenge trials, which recruit healthy volunteers and expose them to the virus, be permitted given the lack of treatment options? What are the ethical responsibilities of physicians to patients requesting experimental or unproven treatments for COVID-19?

Panelists include:

Alex John London(Clara L. West Professor of Ethics and Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University)

Patricia J. Zettler (Assistant Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and a member of Ohio State’s Drug Enforcement and Policy Center and Comprehensive Cancer Center)

Dónal O’Mathúna(Associate Professor, College of Nursing, Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare)

Alex John London (Clara L. West Professor of Ethics and Philosophy, Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy, and Director of the Ethics, History and Public Policy Program, Carnegie Mellon University)

In an era of Big Data and collaborative science, there has been a push for researchers, universities, and health systems to share their data. The massive datasets that result from sharing have the potential to unearth unique insights and make powerful predictions that will positively benefit human health and wellbeing. However, data sharing on a massive scale also introduces new ethical risks – including threats to privacy, challenges for informed consent, the commodification of personal information, and undermining the public trust in research. In this panel we will discuss these risks as well as role that universities like OSU should play in safeguarding individual rights and in equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of research.

Panelists include:

Kayte Spector-Bagdady (Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Chief of Research Ethics Service in the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School)

Recently, genomic research has allowed us to take great strides in predicting disease susceptibility and optimizing treatments. However, Indigenous peoples, including American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, remain underrepresented and understudied in genetic and clinical health research and so are less likely to benefit from these important advances. Given past violations of research ethics, lack of community engagement and transparency, many members of indigenous communities are unwilling to share personal health information, including DNA, with the research community. How should researchers approach these communities in ways that build trust, foster collaboration, and support equitable outcomes?

The Center for Ethics and Human Values' CARE program is co-sponsored by the Office of Research with support from the OSUMC Center for Bioethics and the College of Public Health.

There has been a recent push for community engaged research, particularly when the research is conducted across cultural, structural and economic differences. In this panel we will examine what exactly ought to count as engaging a community as a research partner. What constitutes a community in the first place? Can individual representatives be recruited to speak for the community? If so, who? How do our common research practices and norms – such as informed consent and authorship - change when we engage the community? How do we measure the success of a projects’ community engagement?

Panelists include:

Charles Weijer (Professor; Canada Research Chair in Bioethics, Western University)

December 3, 2019 -International Research, Local Practices

When it comes to conducting international research, there are distinctive ethical challenges that researchers must confront given the global reach of their work. Securing host country approval and adhering to regulatory oversight are important, but they do not ensure community buy-in on the ground or that researchers are designing their studies in a manner that is sensitive to and respectful of local practices. In this CARE panel, we will explore some recent cases where researchers had to navigate complex ethical terrain in the course of their field work.

October 22, 2019 - The Ethics of Paying Research Subjects

It is common practice to offer payment to research subjects, either to enhance recruitment or to enable people to participate without financial sacrifice. While common, the practice is highly contentious. Some worry that paying subjects unduly influences their choice to participate, by impairing their judgment or by giving them an offer they cannot refuse. Others argue that we do not pay research participants enough, making participation for research overly burdensome for some already marginalized populations. This panel will debate these concerns. Questions that will be discussed include the following: Is it ever wrong to offer money for research participation? Is some payment too much or too little? What alternatives to monetary compensation are appropriate? Who should decide how much research subjects get paid?

September 17, 2019 ​​​​​​- The Ethics of Co-Authorship in Research

Scholarship is rarely, if ever, a one-person job anymore. Co-authored papers are common in the sciences and are becoming more prominent in the humanities due to greater specialization, technological assistance in communication and data sharing, the emergence of funding for big collaborative projects, and increased institutional openness to interdisciplinary work. With increased opportunities and expectations for collaboration, researchers face many ethical conundrums in thinking about how to give everyone due credit for the work that they put in. This panel will address some of the most pressing issues in the ethics of joint authorship and collaboration. Topics will include how to navigate power imbalances in the authorship relationship, how to hold each other accountable, when one should refuse to co-author, and the differences between authorship, contribution, and mentorship.

April 23, 2019 - The Researcher as Advocate?

Many people go into research because of their deep moral commitment to some cause. Many researchers become deeply committed to some social causes as a result of their research. How does one balance their role as researcher and their role as advocate? This panel invited researchers who have engaged in advocacy related to racial justice, climate change, and HIV research. In this panel, we discussed how their research has informed and been informed by their work in advocacy and whether they have encountered tensions between these two roles.

March 26, 2019 - Research in Humanitarian Crises

Disasters and conflicts lead to crises that call for humanitarian responses. How can we know that the type of response being provided is actually effective, timely, and the best use of the available resources? To answer these questions, there has been a recent drive for more research and other evidence-generating activities related to humanitarian aid. But research related to humanitarian aid often involve human participants and thus raise ethical issues of their own. This CARE panel discussed the distinctive challenges of conducting research during and after humanitarian crises. Among the questions discussed: How can such research avoid exploitation? What counts as good evidence of efficacy? What sort of risks can we expect research participants to sign up for? Is informed consent possible? Are there conditions under which research is not appropriate and the sole priority should be providing aid?

This panel was a session in the PREA International Conference on Ethics and Humanitarian Research.

February 19, 2019 - Reproducibility in Research

According to one recent Nature survey, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Some claim that these findings point to a “Crisis of Reproducibility” and it has caused alarm in a far ranging number of disciplines. But is there really any crisis at play and if so what are the ethical responsibilities of researchers and institutions in addressing this trend? This panel discussed the potential ethical implications for the lack of reproducibility in research results not only for the reliability of science but also for the safety of research subjects.

January 22, 2019 - Conflicts of Interest and Research: Is Disclosure Enough?

A New York Times/Pro Publica investigation recently exposed dozens of leading medical figures who have failed to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals. This has resulted in high profile resignations from leading medical research centers and investigations into the policies of leading journals. In this inaugural panel we will discuss the nature of this pressing problem and how it can best be addressed. Some questions that we will discuss: How should we address the danger of conflicts of interest? Is disclosure enough? Given the nature of these ethical abuses, is the term 'conflict-of-interest' the appropriate term? Is it too bland? Failure to disclose conflicts of interest is a breach of public trust, but is there any evidence that COIs actually have any effect on research outcomes? Do professional and institutional bodies overemphasize the dangers of financial COIs without attending to the prevalence of non-financial conflicts of interest?